Power customer finds delays shocking

By Peter Lewis
Times consumer-affairs reporter

THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES Ron Frymier, who stands just over 5 feet 7 inches tall, can reach up and touch a Seattle City Light power line that droops from an aging power pole at his Tukwila residence.

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Three times, he said, the utility has dispatched supervisors to visit his Tukwila home to view the split pole City Light put in his back yard decades ago. Each time, he recalled, the supervisor would say more or less the same thing: "Yikes! That needs immediate attention."

Frymier thought he was getting results when a City Light crew dropped off a new 30-foot cedar pole to replace his old bent one. But that was 15 months ago; the new pole still sits in a gutter near his front yard.

This spring, after his most recent call to City Light, another crew arrived. They used spray paint to mark where the new pole should go. "We'll be out there next week," a supervisor told him at the time, Frymier recounted.

He's still waiting.

Meantime, Frymier, 53, who said he is recovering from cancer treatments, tries to steer clear of the cracked pole and maneuver under the sagging lines. They run parallel to his driveway and come within a few feet of a parked boat.

"I'm kind of freaked out," said Frymier, who has lived in his home nearly 30 years.

Problem with a power pole? Here are numbers for customers to report concerns about utility poles: Seattle City Light: 206-684-3000 Puget Sound Energy: 888-225-5773 Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, which takes complaints regarding private utilities, like PSE, and only after the customer has first tried to resolve the problem directly with the utility: 800-562-6150

"They say they're going to do something every time I call them," he said. "But they do nothing."

A City Light official didn't dispute Frymier's general account, and acknowledged the cracked pole and low-hanging lines pose hazards. First, the pole could fall over and hit someone or something. Second, even relatively low-voltage service wires should clear the ground by 12 feet to avoid contact, the official said.

"We screwed up," admitted Dave Smith, City Light's director of electrical services for the South End. "I've got egg on my face."

Smith said Frymier's is one of as many as 100 poles that engineers have issued orders for maintenance crews to replace. But the work order on Frymier's pole has grown more hair than most, Smith said.

The utility has about 100,000 poles, and poles generally last about 40 years, Smith said. He said the utility is behind in terms of replacing poles as fast as it should. Instead of about 2,500 a year, the utility in recent years has been replacing them at the rate of roughly 2,000 annually, Smith said.

Noting that Frymier's wait has been exceptionally long. Smith pledged this week that a crew would finally replace the pole before the end of the month.

	THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES Ron Frymier first contacted Seattle City Light about a problem power pole 2½ years ago. Crews dropped off a replacement 15 months ago, but the new pole still sits in a gutter near his front yard.

Smith speculated that maintenance crews kept deferring the job because Frymier's pole is in a spot that will require them to dig a hole by hand instead of relying on motorized equipment.

City Light is not the only utility that has failed to keep up with customer requests to replace poles in questionable condition.

Roger Kouchi, a regulatory analyst in the consumer-affairs division of the Washington Utilities & Transportation Commission, said the state gets a handful of calls a year from customers served by regulated utilities.

(City Light is not among them, on the theory that government-owned utilities do not require state oversight to take care of customers).

One of the most recent cases that's come to Kouchi's attention involved Don Williams, a Puget Sound Energy customer who lives near Silverdale in unincorporated Kitsap County. For at least two years, Williams said, he's been living in fear that a tall pole carrying high-voltage wires would fall into his yard.

"I have been a dog yapping at their heels," said Williams, referring to Puget Sound Energy. He said starlings had tunneled through the 14-inch-diameter pole to raise chicks, plus a woodpecker went to work "way up on top." He said he ended up pushing tree branches in the hole to keep the starlings out because he became concerned about the pole's stability.

Williams, 74, with a 37-year career in the Air Force and the Navy, said his efforts to get the utility's attention were going nowhere until he "got hold of Roger" at the UTC.

Puget Sound Energy spokeswoman Dorothy Bracken confirmed that a PSE engineer examined the pole and determined it needed replacement. Williams' earlier requests for attention had fallen through the cracks, she said. Even after he complained to the commission, the utility missed a 60-day deadline to replace the pole by July 4, records show.

But earlier this week, the utility finished replacing the 70-foot transmission pole, which supports lines carrying 115,000 volts. The utility, the state's largest, has about 300,000 distribution poles to maintain in nine counties, and replaced more than 1,100 last year, Bracken said.

Williams' conclusion? "I should have been talking to the commission all along," he said.

Peter Lewis: 206-464-2217 or plewis@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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